medieval

Medieval Leavings (https://medievaleavings.hcommons.org/) is a new, Open Access, online journal that publishes editorial orphans on topics in Medieval Studies (broadly construed) and makes them available for our community to use. We hope to ameliorate some of the inequities (and maybe also indignities) of journal publishing.

Medieval Leavings will also feature a special section, Archival Darlings (https://medievaleavings.hcommons.org/our-archival-darlings/), highlighting exciting archival finds that may be useful for other scholars to know about, but that simply don’t fit our own formal publication plans.

Traditionally attributed to King Solomon and defined by Rabbi Akiva as the “Holy of Holies” among the sacred scriptures (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5), the Song of Songs is one of the most fascinating and controversial Biblical books. Fervently read and carefully explained, celebrated as a key to the supreme mystery of the union between God and men, the Song of Songs, the primary source for the Christian pervasive metaphor of the sacred marriage and eros, was a text crucial not only to the Middle Ages, but also to the Renaissance period. This ambivalent book, which combined a sensual celebration of love with a well-established tradition of allegorical interpretation, held a particular appeal for poets.

The Medieval at Home: Domesticity in the Middle Ages

The Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University is pleased to announce its thirtieth annual graduate student colloquium, which will take place on the 15th of February 2020 at the A.D. White House on Cornell’s Ithaca, NY campus.

The Witch in Medieval and Early-Modern Literature

In our supposedly disenchanted world, depictions of witches follow fairly standard aesthetic and ideological criteria the role of which is to maintain or, on the contrary, to challenge societal considerations regarding gender roles or normative female bodily depictions. But such standardization does not do justice to the heterogeneity of representations that pre-modern witches actually possessed.

I'll be submitting a proposal for a panel on *Medieval Neurodiversity* to the Annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Medievalists conference, to be held at the 2020 Congress in London, Ontario, at the University of Western Ontario, June 3-5.  Discussions could tie in to medieval disability studies in a number of ways, including:

- medieval mental states/mental health, queer minds, nonbinary minds, anxious minds

- depictions of radical introversion (e.g., Diogenes)

- mental complexity in Middle English (e.g., Hoccleve)

- medieval social anxiety (e.g., Merlin and social exile in Monmouth, de Boron, et al.)

From Ragnarok to Revelation, from the utopian proposals of Plato’s Republic to the dystopian vision of Huxley’s Brave New World, a prominent concern of human language and literature has always been to describe possible futures. Some of these visions of the future are cataclysmic, looking forward to a time when Heaven—or Mother Earth—will wipe the slate clean; others propose a more optimistic vision of progress. Recent films such as Interstellar or Tomorrowland have taken a middle way, suggesting that although humanity has recently fallen short of its promise, there still remains hope that we will be able to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

The Medievalism in Popular Culture Area (including Anglo-Saxon, Robin Hood, Arthurian, Chaucer, Norse, and other materials connected to medieval studies) accepts papers on all topics that explore either popular culture during the Middle Ages or transcribe some aspect of the Middle Ages into the popular culture of later periods.  These representations can occur in any genre, including film, television, novels, graphic novels, gaming, advertising, art, etc.   For this year’s conference, I would like to encourage submissions on some of the following topics:

Medieval English Theatre Conference

University of Wolverhampton Saturday, 4 April 2020

 Consumption, Performance, and Early Theatre

Durham Early Modern Conference 20208th July 2020, 09:00 to 10th July 2020, 17:00, Durham University

Call for Papers for the Durham Early Modern Conference 2020 is now open. The deadline for submissions of Monday 11 November 2019.

We are also pleased to confirm the following keynote speakers:

·Professor Florence Hsia, Professor of History of Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison

·Professor Laurie Shannon, Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of Literature, Northwestern University

·Professor Marc Vanscheeuwijck, Professor of Musicology, University of Oregon

Call for papers

Trinity College Dublin, 24-25 April 2020

Proposals for papers are invited for a conference on The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Hearing and Auditory Perception, which aims to provide an international and interdisciplinary forum for researchers with an interest in the history of the senses in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Keynote Speaker:

Professor David Hendy, University of Sussex

Echoes on the Air: How Modern Media Evoke and Dramatize
the Sounds of the Distant Past

Call for Papers for Does the Matter of Britain (Still) Matter?: Reflections on the State of Arthurian Studies Today (A Roundtable)

51st Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association

Boston Marriott Copley Place, in Boston, Massachusetts, from 5-8 March 2020

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Paper abstracts are due by 7 October 2019

Session organizer: Michael A. Torregrossa, The Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain

The Song of Songs in European Poetry (13th-17th Centuries)

Translations, Appropriations, Rewritings

University of Padova, 29-30 June 2020

12th-Annual Medievalists @ Penn (M@P) Graduate Conference

Date: April 17, 2020
Keynote: Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College), author of
Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (2015)

In “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco asks the question: “What would Ruskin, Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites have said if they had been told that the rediscovery of the Middle Ages would be the work of the twentieth-century mass media?”

Indeed, the twentieth-century mass media has disseminated what Eco calls, “escapism à la Tolkien” which has influenced many modern writers and cultural producers in other mass media such as films and video games. Although such “escapism à la Tolkien,” or “Tolkienesque” fantasy, seems harmless as pure entertainment, its consumption is massive, and many picture the Middle Ages not as it actually was, but how it is depicted through medievalist fantasy.